You Can Upgrade a Macbook Faster Than You Can Boil an Egg

There’s one big drawback to Apple’s thin, svelte laptop: once you pull the trigger on a Macbook, you’re generally stuck with the specs for life. So when a company claims to offer an idiot-proof SSD upgrade, it’s worth checking out.

OWC’s new Aura SSDs are designed to replace the stock SSDs in 2013-or-newer Macbook Pros and Airs. Unlike the processor and RAM, which are soldered onto the Macbook’s logic board, the solid state drive is accessible through a bunch of screws. Why don’t more people change the drive out? Well, it’s a custom-sized part with a proprietary connector, so a standard laptop SSD would be useless.

Enter OWC’s new drives. They come in 480GB and 1TB sizes, and yes, they’re expensive as hell: $400 for the 480GB, and $650 for the 1TB drive. That’s more than a regular SSD, but what were you expecting?

The drive also comes with a sweetener: an enclosure for the old SSD, which lets you turn it into a beautiful (and blazingly fast) external drive. The kit also includes two tiny Torx screwdrivers, which OWC claims is all you need to swap the drives out.